Mark5chapter 5

Mark 5:1-5

The country of the Gadarenes on the eastern shore opens the most detailed deliverance account in the Gospels, and Mark's portrait of the man runs five verses where Matthew gives one: the tombs for a house, the snapped chains and fetters, no man able to tame him, and the night-and-day crying and cutting with stones. The bench reads the detail as the point, a life the powers had unmade in every register, social, physical, and mental, told by an eyewitness who remembered the sound of it. The tombs mark him as unclean by every measure the law had; the chapter will end with him clothed and in his right mind, and the distance between those two pictures is the story.

Mark 5:6-10

But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshipped him, while the voice from within cried out in dread, and the commentators note the split honestly: the wreck of a man drawn toward his deliverer, and the powers in him adjuring by God against torment, the confession of 5:7, Son of the most high God, torn out of the unwilling. Asked his name, the spirit answers, My name is Legion: for we are many, the Roman word for a force of thousands standing in a Gospel written for Rome. The begging not to be sent out of the country is left as the text leaves it; the bench declines to build a doctrine of territorial assignment on a demon's request, while noting the request is real.

Mark 5:11-14

A great herd of swine, about two thousand, Mark alone counts them, feeds near the mountains, and the spirits beg passage into it. One word of leave and the herd runs violently down the steep place into the sea, the destruction that had been housed in one man made visible at scale. The old moral question, the owners' loss, is answered on the text's own terms: a man is worth more than many swine, and the unclean animals of a Gentile economy are the story's furniture, not its target. The keepers flee and the report runs through city and country, Mark's usual wildfire.

Mark 5:15-17

Sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind: the three-fold portrait answers verse 3 to 5 point for point, the wild man of the tombs now still, dressed, and sane at Jesus' feet. And they were afraid, Mark says of the onlookers, more afraid of the healing than they had been of the madman, and they pray Jesus to depart out of their coasts. The commentators let the indictment stand without softening it: a community that had learned to live with the destruction could not live with the deliverer, and the swine weighed heavier than the man.

Mark 5:18-20

That he might be with him is the healed man's one request, and it is the only recorded prayer in the chapter that Jesus refuses. Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee: the man who is elsewhere commanded to silence is here commissioned to speak, and the bench resolves the reversal by geography, for in Gentile Decapolis there is no messianic-secret pressure and no crowd to misread a political Christ. He publishes through the ten cities and all men marvel; when Jesus returns to this shore at 7:31 to 8:9, four thousand are waiting, and the commentators read this man as the region's first evangelist.

Mark 5:21-24

When Jesus was passed over again by ship, Jairus, one of the rulers of the synagogue, falls at his feet for his little daughter at the point of death, and Mark now builds his signature structure: the Jairus story will be interrupted by the woman in the crowd and resumed after, each story reading the other. A synagogue ruler and an unclean woman, twelve years of a girl's life and twelve years of a woman's disease, a public plea and a hidden touch, and one word, faith, judging both. The exposition states the device here once and then walks the scenes at their own pace; Jesus goes with him, and the thronging crowd sets the stage for a touch nobody saw.

Mark 5:25-29

An issue of blood twelve years had made the woman ceremonially unclean the whole time (Lev 15:25-27), excluded from temple, synagogue, and ordinary touch, and Mark adds the detail Luke the physician softens: she had suffered many things of many physicians, spent everything, and grown worse. Her plan is spoken in her own head, if I may touch but his clothes, I shall be whole, faith mixed with a almost superstitious secrecy, and the bench is kind to the mixture since the Lord was. She touches the garment's edge in the press and straightway the fountain is dried; the healing is instant, felt in the body, and entirely unobserved, she believes, by anyone.

Mark 5:30-34

Who touched my clothes, Jesus asks, and the question sounds absurd to the disciples in a thronging crowd, so the commentators draw the distinction the scene turns on: many pressed, one touched. Jesus knows virtue has gone out of him and will not let the healing stay anonymous, not to shame the woman but to finish her cure, since a woman healed in secret would have lived the rest of her life afraid her uncleanness still barred her. She comes trembling, tells him all the truth, and receives what the touch alone could not give: Daughter, the only woman Jesus so addresses in the Gospels, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace. Faith, not the garment, did it, and he says so publicly.

Mark 5:35-40

Thy daughter is dead: the delay in the crowd has cost, humanly speaking, everything, and the message adds why troublest thou the Master any further. Jesus overhears and answers the ruler before despair can, Be not afraid, only believe, the word the interrupting woman's story had just illustrated. He takes only Peter, James, and John, meets the hired tumult of weeping and wailing, and declares the damsel not dead but sleeping; the mourners' laughter proves at least that the death was real and publicly known. The bench reads sleepeth as the Lord's own word for a death he is about to reverse, not a denial of it, the same usage he gives Lazarus.

Mark 5:41-43

Talitha cumi: Mark keeps the Aramaic syllables Peter heard in the room and translates them, Damsel, I say unto thee, arise, the homely address a father might use, little lamb, get up. She rises straightway and walks, and Mark alone notes she was twelve years old, the age that binds her story to the woman's twelve years of disease. Two commands close the scene and each is the Lord's realism: tell no man, the messianic secret at its strictest since a raising in Galilee could ignite exactly the wrong fire, and give her something to eat, resurrection attended by lunch, the detail of an eyewitness and the tenderness of the healer.